


deathbound

by hoverbun



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Character Study, Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:14:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6234676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoverbun/pseuds/hoverbun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn't remember when he died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	deathbound

( Youngest of four. Tall for his age. Outlived his sisters. Used to have his mother's eyes, but with time, they grew cold. )  
  
The dead have nothing but their memories. Buried in the crooks of their bones and the aching centres of their skulls lies their once-lives, reflections of cold sunlight and breathing over the sloughs of water. He remembers almost dying before his pilgrimage to the Shadow Isles. When the wind catches the split skin and howls through the chasm of his abdomen, he laughs with fondness.

What would he have gained if he had not sought forth, and let time catch him first? It was his destiny to give himself to the undead - yet he wonders, between sermons and hauntings, if his fascinations and obsessions would have discarded fate.  
  
When he was alive, he almost drowned.

The water was cold.

It was welcoming.

It felt like a baptism, the way death reached its hands up around him and grazed his skin with its touch. He can't remember if it came as an attack by highwaymen looking to rob him, or if he willingly knelt and tried to end his life. He only remembers cold, cold, and then the cut of air.  
  
In the underbelly of Noxus, where people are born to die, he came to be. The tallymen of the Kindred were his service, and then his congregation. When he ushered his father to the afterlife on a last aching breath waning on blue lips and dirty teeth, he felt the roll of a distant wind crawl up his spine. Something called for him. Something told him he could be more than a dead spirit held within a mortal prison. It was a haunting that wrapped itself over him, and kept its grip.  
  
Yet, that was from an older time. A time lost to history, buried like dried blood in Noxian almshouses and the bodies that they couldn't burn. The memories are not needed. They only remind him of who he willingly became, embracing death as a purification of the burden that is life. Not many wraiths remember what it was like to live.

( They burn their dead in Noxus, and bury them in Demacia. )

They use his name in secret covens, from the darkest corners of Noxus to the shores of Ionia, services to usher the dead into their graves, finding peace in the myth of the man who went to die. They sing in his memory, and bring forth echoes from the realm of the dead.

When the purging comes, harrowed winds that bleed over Bilgewater shores and crawl into the homes of mainland Valoran, those who do not perish follow the song of the Deathsinger. They don't learn their sermons are beacons to call forth his presence. Too many see the Harrowing as a night of chaos. He believes it a pilgrimage.

( We are all buried. The ground is cold, like water. )


End file.
